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The Iberia Performing Arts League will present a special benefit performance of David W. Rintels’ Clarence Darrow. All ticket sales for the one-man-show, starring Vincent P. Barras as the formidable lawyer, will benefit technical improvements at the theater and the Daily Iberian’s Christmas 2016 “Help the Helpers” campaign.

Clarence Darrow is perhaps the most famous trial lawyer of the 20th century. Though his practice began in 1878 and included his defense of Eugene V. Debs, a prominent union supporter, in the Pullman Strike of 1894, his most famous cases came in the 20th century. This famous Chicago lawyer defended William "Big Bill" Haywood in 1907 on the charge of killing a former Idaho governor, and defended the McNamara brothers against dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building. Charges of bribery during that last trial effectively ended Darrow's career as a labor lawyer, so he switched to civil and criminal defense, gaining an even greater reputation.

His most famous trials occurred in the twenties. In 1924, he successfully defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two rich teenagers who murdered a fourteen year old boy purely for the excitement of the act, saving them from the death penalty. In 1925, he defended John Scopes in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, where Scopes was found guilty of violating a Tennessee Law banning the teaching of evolution in high schools. That same year, he defended Dr. Ossian Sweet, a prominent African American doctor who dared to buy a home in an all-white neighborhood, and during a scuffle to remove him, a white man was killed. Darrow managed to get all eleven African Americans in the house acquitted of murder charges.

Rintels brings all these trials, and Darrow's personal life, into sharp focus in the one-man play. Versions of this play have been on Broadway starring Henry Fonda in 1974 and most recently Kevin Spacey in 2014.